America Burning

The Yarnell Hill Fire Tragedy and the Nation's Wildfire Crisis

Story by Stacey Solie

Dec. 30, 2013 – When a crew of wildland firefighters hiked into the brown hills of central Arizona on June 30, they were determined to fight fire in a grassy wildland mottled by developments and choked with dry scrub, in a place that hadn’t seen significant flames since 1966.

It was hot. Radios across the region blared warnings about the rising mercury, the whole of the Southwest sweltering. Phoenix had hit a record 119 degrees the day before, and in the mile-high town of Prescott, 90 miles northwest, thermometers were showing triple digits for the third day in a row.

It was not only hot, it was dry. After an unusually warm spring and less than an inch of precipitation since early February, the sun had been sucking out every drop of moisture from an already parched landscape, leaving grassy wildlands mottled by developments and dry scub. The area hadn’t seen a major burn in more than 40 years. That was about to drastically change.

The dry heat compounded the task set before the two dozen or so wildland firefighters that had been called out to help control a fire started by a lightning strike on the evening of Friday, June 28. Because it was dark and not easy to reach, an Arizona Forestry Division commander decided against trying to put out the less than an acre fire that evening. The next day, six inmates from a state prison were helicoptered to the fire that was dancing atop a mountain ridge cluttered with granite boulders and thick chaparral scrub. By noon, the fire was still less than eight acres.

More firefighters were called in, and by mid afternoon, the state commander, thinking the fire was contained, began releasing crews and equipment. But late afternoon, winds fanned the flames, and by early evening the fire was burning out of control in the scrubby, hilly rangeland 32 miles southwest of Prescott, Arizona.

In 36 hours the flames had gone from a small brush fire to more than 500 acres that threatened hundreds of people who lived in the scattered homes and villages of Yarnell, Peeples Valley and Glen Ilah. By late Saturday night, the state called in additional reinforcements, including two of the nation’s 110 Interagency Hotshot Crews, that specialize in controlling wildfires. Nearly all hotshots are attached to federal land management agencies with most assigned to the U.S. Forest Service.

Early Sunday morning, June 30, the Granite Mountain Hotshot crew, the only crew in the United States that is part of a municipal fire department, left their home base at the Prescott Fire Department, and began hiking through the dense high desert scrub.

By sunset that evening, 19 members of the crew would be dead, trapped in a box canyon, engulfed in flames, six hundred yards short of the nearest town. Only the crew’s lookout, who was whisked out of danger by another hotshot crew, would survive.

While investigators have pieced together many of the minute-to-minute events, documenting exactly where and how the fire spread and the myriad of responses and mistakes that were made, from lapses in radio communication, to disputes over tactics between fire commanders, to violations of a number of basic wildland firefighting rules, much remains unknown.

The biggest mystery is exactly why the Granite Mountain Hotshots descended from a burned-out safe zone on a mountain ridge overlooking Yarnell, and into the canyon, where they lost sight of the fire until it was upon them.

But what is not mysterious, indeed what the Yarnell Hill fire has made painfully clear, are the ways in which wild land firefighting has become increasingly dangerous, with 372 deaths documented since the mid 1990s.

Given the explosive and powerful nature of fires, fighting them could never be entirely free of risks. But one of the biggest threats firefighters face today are not from the truly wild fires, burning far from civilization, but instead come from places where homes and entire neighborhoods are constructed in the midst of forests and grasslands.

In the 1990s alone, an estimated 8.4 million homes were built in what fire experts call the wildland-urban interface or, fire-prone natural areas that abut settlements, according to a 2006 U.S. Forest Service report. The Arizona Republic tabulated more than 257,000 new homes in fire-prone areas statewide, and 32,000 in the Prescott Valley.

“Urban sprawl is colliding with wild lands,” said Stephen Pyne, a fire historian at Arizona State University, who has written several books about wildfire and is also a former hotshot. “That matters because these two don't mix. Fires in one don't belong in the other.”

U.S. forests and grasslands evolved to withstand periodic fire. Some grasses and trees even require fire, as it triggers the release of seeds, which can then take advantage of bare ground and sunlight to germinate.

A legacy of national, state and local policies calling for firefighters to extinguish all fires as soon as possible has robbed the land of this cyclical stress, and has inadvertently allowed trees, needles, pine cones, grasses and scrub to pile up like kindling.

And with today’s warmer climates, mild winters, earlier springs and hotter, drier summers, the land is being primed to burn. Increasingly fires are reaching epic proportions, becoming “megafires,” which are burning millions of acres every year.

“People are in danger now because the climate has shifted on us,” said the Weather Channel’s Mike Bettes. “In the desert southwest the atmosphere is so dry that these big raining thunderstorms all evaporate before it hits the ground, but the lightning strikes all this dry tinder and you've got a wildfire in an instant.”

“It's getting denser and denser, drier and drier. The fires are burning hotter because of that and they’re burning faster,” said Prescott Fire Department spokesman Wade Ward.

“We’ve got more and more homes in these locations where we’re trying to defend that space, and we’re losing property, we’re losing lives because people are choosing to live there.”

Smokey Bear, the U.S. Forest Service’s mascot, has famously cautioned about fire prevention since the 1940s, but now, fire officials are acknowledging that most fires aren’t really prevented. They’re postponed.

The Granite Mountain Hotshots set out on foot early that Sunday morning on June 30, draped in flame-resistant Nomex clothing, loaded down with chainsaws and Pulaskis -- specially designed pickaxes -- and only enough water for themselves.

Wildland firefighting is distinct from urban firefighting in that burning structures can be attacked from laddered fire trucks, using industrial hose hooked into deep reservoirs of public water supplies. Hotshot crews are often limited to what they carry.

Fires in the wild aren’t put out so much as burned out, by cutting “lines” in the vegetation, clearing away the fuel the flames need to keep going. Hotshots also learn to fight fire with fire, setting controlled burns, beating the fire at its own game by getting there first.

The Granite Mountain crew cut a path through the rocky and sometimes steep terrain, slowed by boulder-strewn fields interlaced with matted grasses, patches of dense, thorny scrub and scraggly junipers - vegetation typical of a high- desert range where fire had been absent - suppressed - for nearly 50 years.

By 3:50 p.m., the wind began what would become a 180-degree shift, and the wild fire’s path changed from the northerly direction it had followed throughout the day, forcing residents in Peeples Valley, Model Creek and the Double Bar A Ranch to flee. As a powerful thunderstorm approached from the northeast, what had been the flank of the fire suddenly became its head and the fire began sweeping south across the landscape towards the Mountaineer Trailer Park and the small retirement enclaves of Glen Ilah and Yarnell.

“This thing is running straight for Yarnell,” a Granite Mountain Hotshot wrote in a text to his mother at about 4 p.m.

Video recovered from firefighters at the scene captured the final radio communications from the crew.

“I’m here with Granite Mountain Hotshots, our escape route has been cut off,” said the crew’s supervisor, Eric Marsh. “We are preparing a deployment site and we are burned out around ourselves in the brush and I’ll give you a call when we are under the she, the shelters.”

Everyone knew that was bad. Deploying shelters - essentially pup tents made to deflect heat, not withstand flames - was a last resort, and the crew was supposed to be “in the black,” a safe, burned-out area.

Investigators believe the 2,000-degree fire, with 40-foot long flames fed by powerful winds, swept across the last 100 yards to where the men deployed their fire shelters in 19 seconds.

The fire that would soon take 19 lives would also burn over 100 homes and structures, not sparing even the Shrine of St. Joseph’s retreat center, which lost a gift shop, two dormitories, a caretaker’s house and a crucifix.

Firefighters attend a candlelight vigil in honor of the fallen firefighters at Prescott High School on July 2, 2013, Prescott, Ariz. (Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

The problems posed by fire in the wildland-urban Interface are not new.

In one of two investigative reports examining the events leading up to the crew’s deaths, the Arizona Forestry Division was cited and fined for sending the men to defend homes deemed indefensible. The state is appealing the fine.

Some neighborhoods participate in Firewise, a National Fire Protection Association program, which teaches how to actively manage the land around homes to mitigate the chance of fire.

During off-months, the Granite Mountain crew helped people in Prescott clear pine needles off roofs, cut dead trees and branches and clear brush or bramble, shrubs and trees deemed too close to the house. At block parties, the hotshots brought in a massive wood chipper and hauled away debris that would otherwise provide fodder for fires.

But with only one thousand communities certified nationwide, these programs have yet to spread as the wildfire has. In Prescott, 23 neighborhoods are certified FireWise, said PJ Cathey, Chair of Prescott Area Wildland Urban Interface Commission.

Dean Smith watches as the Yarnell Hill Fire encroaches on his home in Glenn Ilah, June 30, 2013 near Yarnell, Ariz. (AP Photo/The Arizona Republic, David Kadlubowski)

“The Yarnell community was not one of them,” Cathay said, though some individual property owners did take precautions.

Larger properties are more expensive to manage and maintain, and federal grant funding usually covers only the first treatment.

Also, some people are just not interested.

“We have those who are tree huggers, and those who are not going to be told what to do,” Cathay said.

Questions about who is responsible when fire breaks out on private land, and who should pay to mitigate fire danger, challenge many of the individualistic, frontier philosophies that historically helped define the West.

“There is a consequence to not providing defensible space to your house, and there is a consequence to not providing the ability for us to do our jobs like we’d like to,” said Prescott Fire Department Spokesman Wade Ward.

What many homeowners in the wildland-urban interface don’t realize is that the biggest threat is not from an approaching wall of fire, but from embers that take flight on the wind and silently land on wooden roofs, said Michele Steinberg, a Wildland Fire Projects Manager. After whole neighborhoods are evacuated, there’s no one left to notice a smoldering ember, much less put it out.

“Once one home ignites, it's a chain reaction, and it goes from home to home to home,” Steinberg said.

But increasingly, people are thinking about the future.

”People are asking, ‘What could be done? What about regulation? What about planning?’ instead of ‘Who can be blamed for this fire?’ which has been the question for a long time.”

Even as places like California have enacted building codes aimed at creating defensible space, so much new development has already happened without taking fire into consideration.

Homes are built with wooden shaker roofs, in a landscape where the oldest surviving structures are made of adobe. Junipers, nick-named “little gas cans” in the fire community for their flammability, are still a popular landscaping choice.

“There are so many things that are different,” Pyne said.“The climate has changed, land use has changed. What we're willing to tolerate has changed,” he said. “It's just a mess.”

Compared to 40 years ago, wildfires are now consuming on average twice as many acres per year, U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell said at a 2012 Senate hearing.

"Large and long-duration forest fires have increased fourfold over the past 30 years in the American West,” the National Research Council's Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate 2010 report says.

Fire seasons are also two and a half months longer than they used to be. “Recent research indicates that earlier snow melt, temperature changes and drought associated with climate change are important contributors to this increase in forest fire," the report concludes.

Retrofitting existing developments in fire-prone areas will be costly, but the expense of fire suppression is already a huge and growing public burden.

The average federal budget for wildfire suppression was less than $1 billion a year throughout the 1990s, but that figure has tripled since the early 2000s. "Wildfire protection now accounts for nearly half of the Forest Service annual budget, and more than 10 percent of the budget for all Department of the Interior agencies," says a report by Headwaters Economics, a non-profit think tank, which recommends that communities limit future development in vulnerable areas.

Some experts predict that fire will increasingly be treated like a hurricane or tsunami, not to be fought, but endured.

Blackened areas define the path of a wildfire on July 7, 2013, in Yarnell, Ariz. (Laura Segall/Getty Images)

But in Yarnell, that model had not yet come into play. Twenty men from the Granite Mountain Hotshots crew went out to fight a fire, to protect the homes of the people who lived in the wildland-urban interface. And only one came back.

Nineteen hearses carried the bodies back to Prescott for a memorial service, and thousands turned out to watch from the side of the road, to honor the fallen men.

Investigations are ongoing. Over a dozen family members of the firefighters and homeowners who lost their houses have accused state and local officials with negligence. They've filed claims, and are seeking more than $300 million. Family members have also said they would be willing to negotiate for policy changes.

“If you look at all the investigation reports from fires where we’ve lost people in history, they all unfortunately say the same thing at the end,” said Wade Ward.

“That, ‘it’s our hope that this investigation will bring to light what’s happened here and that there will be no more purple ribbons,’” said Ward. “Well, we’ve got 19 more. And I hate to say it, but I don’t think they’ll be the last ones.”

Nineteen crosses and American flags adorn the fence outside of Station 7 on July 3, 2013, in Prescott, Ariz. (Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

Credits

Project Produced and Edited by Greg Gilderman and Neil Katz

Video Producers: John Carlos Frey and Joe Halderman

Video Consulting Producer: John Dougherty

Article Author: Stacey Solie

Photo Editor: Edecio Martinez

Video Executive Producers: Greg Gilderman, Neil Katz, Shawn Efran

Special Thanks: The wives and families of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, and Wade Ward of the Prescott, Arizona Fire Department.